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Experian blog: People power– the key to a successful data strategy

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By The Drum Team | Editorial

September 23, 2011 | 3 min read

You only need to see the news or look back at history to see how the power of people can topple regimes, governments and dictators. The same can be said of businesses, so it’s surprising that these essential cogs in the wheel often go ‘un-oiled’ when putting in place a successful data strategy.

When people are mentioned in white papers and ‘how to’ guides, it is usually about their responsibilities, accountabilities or simply ensuring that they know what they are supposed to do. Most of the focus is about the business and how it will benefit.

But adopting this approach can lead to resentment, dissatisfaction and disorientation at the heart of the organisation – the people. Any hopes of embedding a data centric culture are dashed as soon as a project starts if no consideration is given to the people who are actually there to help the organisation achieve its goals and objectives.

There are some fundamental steps that a business should take to ensure it has the crucial stakeholder buy-in it needs. And over the next few months I will share the secrets to achieving this.

Kicking off with step one: get the technical features right first. There is nothing worse than promoting something that can crumble. It will only be met with ridicule and any attempts to resurrect your project at a later stage will be hard work – get it right first time or be prepared to face a greater challenge second time around. Teething problems with systems that may be implemented to support the data strategy and the way in which the data flows can be avoided by undertaking robust testing. This can be achieved by appointing one or many testers who utilise the systems to ensure that everything is working well. An alternative would be to implement new technical features in a phased approach. This can allow you to iron out niggly problems and be confident that these will not affect the implementation of the data strategy.

Next time, I’ll explore how appointing a strong champion can make all the difference to getting stakeholder buy-in and making your data project a success.

Kiran Gill is a data strategy consultant within Experian Marketing Information Services with over 13 years of experience working with customer data in various sectors.

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